It is safe to say that the first two years of the pandemic have left many people exhausted and emotionally drained. A new study suggests that the exhaustion showed a diminished ability to care about other global problems.
The work was based on examining all English-language Twitter for tweets related to climate change, both before and during the pandemic. The researchers involved found that the number of climate-related tweets decreased approximately proportionally to the number of COVID-19 cases, and that the remaining tweets mostly Lake more optimistic than those in pre-pandemic times. Overall, this suggests that the pandemic has put a strain on what some behavioral scientists call our “finite pool of worries.”
in the deep
The idea of a finite pool of worries is probably quite intuitive to most of us. Worrying about something takes an emotional toll on us, and that toll comes from a finite pool of emotional reserves. Once those reserves are exhausted, we don’t really care anymore – we lose the ability to worry about things we would otherwise find. That’s not to say we wouldn’t say they’re not concerned if we were asked to — we probably won’t pay attention to them spontaneously.
At the moment there is some disagreement about how real the finite pole of worry is, so it’s best to consider it a hypothesis. But the pandemic seems like the perfect opportunity to test it, as it created an entirely new category of concern at one point. And in fact, a few studies have looked at it.
Unfortunately, they yielded conflicting results. They looked at Twitter conversations on a different topic, namely climate change, and found that their numbers were declining in some countries, but the effect was inconsistent. A second study looked at public poll data and found no evidence that people were incapable of worrying about climate change as the pandemic raged.
So two researchers from Stony Brook University, Oleg Smirnov and Pei-Hsun Hsieh, decided to go all-inclusive: all 19 million English-language tweets between the first day of 2019 and the end of 2021 that contain the term “climate change.” They analyzed both the raw number of messages and all 18 million of sentiment analysis to determine if anything has changed since the start of the pandemic.
Limited care
On an annual basis, the pandemic has certainly sucked the air out of concerns about climate change. Tweets on the topic dropped more than 30 percent in the first year of the pandemic and remained low the following year. During that time, however, daily Twitter usage increased significantly; adjusting for this saw a 45 percent drop in the first year of the pandemic and just over half in the second.
Not just because climate change was less often in the news during the pandemic. Smirnov and Hsieh found that the number of climate-related stories in newspapers and on TV fell in the first year of the pandemic, but rose to new heights in the second year, so there doesn’t seem to be a connection there. The same was true for serious climate-related events, such as wildfires and hurricanes; any changes in their frequency did not match changes in climate tweets. (Carbon emissions also fell in the first year of the pandemic, but increased again in the second, so this probably wasn’t a factor.)
However, correlations emerged when the researchers looked at weekly measures of the pandemic. Whenever COVID-19 cases doubled, climate-related tweets dropped about 5 percent. Due to the doubling of the number of COVID-19 deaths, climate tweeting fell by more than 7 percent. Put another way, in the US, every 1,000 additional COVID-19 cases were associated with 40 fewer climate-related tweets. There were some exceptions, such as the weeks surrounding presidential debates or the arrival of hurricanes, but a big boost in case the number could easily offset the arrival of a major hurricane.
A minor quirk here is that the number of likes received by climate tweets did not show that pattern; they are rising as the pandemic worsens. But again, the idea of a finite pool of worries doesn’t mean people don’t care about climate change; it just means they don’t have the resources to worry about it.
However, another possible explanation is that the nature of the liked tweets is different. Using two different pieces of software that looked at the emotional content of the tweets, more positive thoughts about the climate were expressed as the pandemic worsened. “Changes in sentiment scores are consistent with the finite pool of worry hypothesis,” the authors write. “As the threat of the pandemic increases, there is less worry about climate change and therefore less negative and more positive sentiment.”
Again, these are only English tweets, and a significant majority of them are from Australia, Canada, UK and US. A previous study found some differences between countries in a similar analysis, so it’s not at all clear whether this is a global phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is worth checking whether this is the case. Because anything that can influence public sentiment on a large scale is probably worth knowing.
PNAS2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2210988119 (About DOIs).
